Home After All

Gracianne Kirsch’s work in Home After All draws from their childhood spent in a rural home built by their father on a mountain top in Redwood Valley, California. The body of work meditates on an accumulation of memories of home, family, growing and changing in the rural Northern California landscape. 

Drawings featuring interior domestic scenes balance simultaneous isolation and crowding. Objects accumulate and clutter the living space. Poems chronicle the little and large dramas of a sibling-filled upbringing. But at the same time, there is a quietness, a stillness, and a loneliness of rural separation and neglect. Compositions are either cluttered with junk or floating with emptiness. This balance of weight and air encompasses the complexity of recollection and childhood emotion. 

Gracianne’s video “Pond Scum” recalls their father’s attempts at building a pond on his land. Pond Scum sets childlike whimsy alongside the reality of Northern California’s changing ecology and droughts. The effects of the Mendocino Complex Fire on the property, the family, and the community loom over much of the work from this era, occasionally surfacing in Kirsch’s poetry and visuals (such as in the titular drawing, Home After All). 

Finally, recent work shows changing visions of “home.” Growing up, moving away, and coming out build into a tender story of queer home-making and visits back to family homes.

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